Preclinical imaging of small animals, for example, rodents, is important in drug development and research exploring genetics and the early diagnosis of diseases. Several neurological conditions have a manifestation in retinal tissue, and can present as lesions in the retinal layers at very early disease stages. Thus, there is, much utility in the ability to diagnose disease by identifying structural changes in the retinal layers, starting with piscine (fish) and murine (rodent) models.
Precise alignment of the rodent eye to an optical system, for example, optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging systems has been a challenge for researchers. Rodents have been historically hard to image because of, for example, the small eye size, poor imaging properties of the eye, and lack of stage that enables the precise alignment of a rodent eye to the optical beam of a fundus camera or clinical OCT scanner. The development of a hand-held OCT probe, while enabling breakthroughs not previously possible, has not made the task much easier by itself, due to the lack of fine control over the angles between the optical axis of the OCT probe and the axis of the rodent eye. The mouse eye has an approximate diameter of 3.3 mm, while the rat eye diameter is around 6.4 mm, and thus, manipulations on a micro level are typically necessary to enable the acquisition of good quality images of the rodent retina. The ball lens phenotype of the rodent eye compared to the human eye typically requires very different optics to capture images of the layers in as fine detail. The design of the specific optics is discussed in commonly assigned United States Patent Publication No. 2009/0268161, published on Oct. 29, 2009, entitled OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY (OCT) IMAGING SYSTEMS HAVING ADAPTABLE LENS SYSTEMS AND RELATED METHODS AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCTS.